Stickies to Replace the Sticky Notes in Windows 10

First introduced in Windows 7, Sticky Notes is a very useful feature that unfortunately didn’t seem to get any improvements no matter how many releases we’ve been gone through. Well, there are a few interesting new things added to the Windows 10 version of Sticky Notes but not nearly enough to convince many who use Evernote, OneNote, or Google’s Keep.

Stickies is one of the alternatives to Windows’ built-in Sticky Notes that shines in so many ways. It’s free, lightweight, robust, and filled with loads of features and offers deep customizations.

To add a new sticky note with Stickies, you can double-click the Stickies icon at the system tray or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + N if you are already on a sticky note. By default, the Stickies icon is hidden in the system tray, but you can go to Settings → Personalization → Taskbar – Select which icons appear on the taskbar to make it appear right on the taskbar like below.

You can create new sticky notes not only in a plain text format but also from the content in Clipboard, Screen Area, or Screenshot. The screenshot & screen area stickies have a drawing and annotation toolset built right in, accessed by a right-click. You can also open a plain image sticky by checking the New stickies are image stickies option in Settings > General tab.

Deep down, each sticky note is a RTF file that can be opened in Word. Therefore, the editing styles that come with the Stickies are fully loaded. Right-click any empty area in the note you will see a full set of the styles available for you to use.

The add/edit features that come with Stickies are already rich but what’s really gone insane is its customization capabilities. Open up the Options window, you will see 9 tabs of stuff that you can customize. There are just too many to show them here in detail but from the screenshot below you get the idea how flexible it is.

Not only that, you can even call up its API if you have your own app that needs the data in Stickies or dress up with your own Skins that give your sticky notes some personalities.

You can manage your own stickies with an interface like this:

All sticky notes created by Stickies are saved in the following location by default, but you can change the location to even put them inside Dropbox or OneDrive so you can have them automatically synced up with other devices.

%appdata%\stickies

If you navigate to that folder you will also notice that all sticky notes are saved in RTF format with an Access database in the back to manage all of them.

Verdict

I am impressed. If you are the one using Windows’ Sticky Notes you should definitely switch over to Stickies.